The Goodnight Song: An absolutely heart-stopping and gripping thriller

by Nick Hollin

  ‘So is that what Mike’s death was? Was it someone else feeding their hunger?’ Nathan lifts his broken hand. ‘And what about me? Was I left alive because I couldn’t kill Christian? Because I didn’t know who killed Fish?’

  ‘You think they were just checking you hadn’t uncovered what Mike knew?’ asks Taylor.

  ‘What did Mike know?’ says Nathan. ‘Have we even figured that out yet?’

  ‘We’ve been through his papers, his house, everything,’ says Taylor. ‘There’s nothing that jumps out.’

  ‘So what next?’ asks Nathan.

  ‘You mean who next,’ says Sam, pointing back at the latest page on the blog. ‘I suppose we just wait and see.’

  The call comes in an hour later, and within twenty minutes Sam, Katie, Nathan and Richard are pushing their way past a police cordon to find the body, propped up against a wheelie bin, the head an indistinguishable mess of blood and brain. Katie points out the long rusty nail sticking out from a patch of sticky hair.

  ‘It looks like he missed a few times before he hit the nail,’ says Sam.

  ‘A few times?’ says Katie, trying to find a face in the confusion of broken skull and bone. She turns to look at Nathan, who has stayed back a little and is slowly scanning their surroundings like she’s seen him do at so many crime scenes before. She hopes he finds something, but she’s doubtful.

  ‘Do we know who he is?’ asks Richard, who’s kept at an even greater distance than Nathan.

  ‘No way of telling from that,’ says Sam, gesturing towards the pulped head and face. ‘Perhaps they were trying to disguise the identity.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ says Katie, slipping on a pair of forensic gloves that she’s found in Sam’s car and reaching carefully forward and tapping at the breast of the victim’s worn brown blazer, before slipping her hand in and slowly pulling out a wallet. ‘Nigel Hartham,’ she says, before adding, ‘Dr Nigel Hartham.’

  Katie hears a sound from behind and turns to see that Richard has stumbled backwards and fallen against the side of the alleyway. His face is pale and his mouth open, registering the shock where words aren’t coming.

  ‘You know him?’ says Sam, reaching out to grab the old man before he falls.

  Richard manages to nod, but his breathing is short and wheezy. Katie and Nathan both rush to help support the doctor, while gently guiding him away from the body and onto a step nearby. Given a little time and a sip from a bottle of water commandeered from a nearby PC, Richard is finally able to talk.

  ‘Is this about me?’ he says, blinking back the tears. ‘Are people dying because of me?’

  ‘Who was he to you?’ asks Nathan. ‘An old colleague?’

  ‘And a good friend,’ says Richard. ‘He helped me when I started getting unwell.’

  ‘With the PTSD?’ asks Katie, before wondering if she should have shared this in front of Sam.

  ‘I couldn’t cope,’ says Richard. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t doing the right things.’

  ‘Like what?’ asks Sam.

  ‘Not here,’ says Katie, lifting the elderly doctor to his feet. Looking over her shoulder, she can see that a crowd of onlookers have started to gather at the end of the alleyway. Some might be media, some just members of the public, but with mobile phones and instant uploads there doesn’t seem to be much difference anymore.

  Ten minutes later, and they’re parked down a backstreet, having given any potential pursuers the slip. Katie and Sam are sitting in the front of the car, Richard and Nathan in the back.

  ‘How might this be connected to you?’ Sam asks the doctor, as sharp and seemingly uncaring as ever.

  Richard lowers his head and runs a hand across the thinning hair on top. He draws in a long breath and for a moment Katie doesn’t believe he’s going to speak. When he finally manages, his voice is so weak she finds herself gripping his arm and giving it a squeeze.

  ‘Nigel Hartham is the only one I’ve ever told. He protected me.’

  ‘Protected you from what?’ asks Nathan.

  ‘From everything,’ says Richard. ‘For forty years I’d worked hard to save patients, to keep them alive. It didn’t matter who they were – and I’ve worked with everybody, rapists, paedophiles, you name it – I did what I could for them, equal effort every time.

  ‘The problem is, when you’ve been on the other side, when you’ve tried and failed to save their victims, mopped up the blood they’ve spilled, watched good hearts stop beating in your hands,’ he lifts his hand as if reliving a specific moment, ‘and you know there are black hearts out there still beating because of you, well…’

  Katie can tell that Sam wants to jump in, but she flashes the superior officer a look that warns her to give him space to tell his story. He swallows hard and reaches out to squeeze Katie’s hand. ‘I told you about losing my wife, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did,’ she says, softly.

  ‘What I didn’t tell you was that the man who drove into her on that day was drunk. Of course, forty years ago the law was very different, but he still shouldn’t have been behind the wheel of that car. And the worst thing is, I saved his life. I didn’t know who he was when they brought him into the hospital. I didn’t know what had happened to my Maggie because of him. If I had known…’

  The doctor lifts his crooked old fingers to the bridge of his nose and squeezes hard. ‘Then, at the very end of my career, when my illness had already taken hold, when I couldn’t sleep, could barely eat, and when the shake in my hands was getting harder and harder to hide, the past came back to haunt me, to challenge me. And I failed.’

  He pauses and takes a slow, wheezy breath, as if to summon up the strength to explain. ‘I wasn’t front line anymore, I was helping with mental health assessments and addictions, people like—’ He cuts himself off before mentioning Ben by name. ‘Anyway, they were short-staffed and there’d been a big road traffic accident, multiple fatalities, and I found myself helping out.

  ‘I was working on one of the drivers, and I could smell the alcohol on his breath. He was young, maybe twenty-five, about the same age as the guy I’d saved all those years ago, and I couldn’t stop thinking about…’ Richard hesitates as if struggling to find the right word, but Katie is sure that he’s had it all along. ‘Revenge.’

  ‘You killed him?’ asks Sam.

  ‘I didn’t save him,’ says Richard. ‘And there was a chance I could have done. I wasn’t working alone, but I was the only one who realised he had internal bleeding. By the time the others caught up, it was too late. All I did was keep my mouth shut, and yet it’s haunted me ever since.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’m still not sure how this could connect to the recent crimes,’ says Nathan, looking down at his taped-up fingers. ‘Are you suggesting it could have been a relative of the victim?’

  ‘There was an inquest,’ says Richard, nodding. ‘Its conclusion was what everybody else was thinking – that I was too old and shouldn’t have been there. But I told my friend the truth. I told the man who’s now lying dead in an alley because of me.’ Richard starts to cry and Katie pulls him in close.

  ‘I don’t think it’s related,’ says Nathan. ‘These crimes are related to my brother and to Mike and to Steven Fish.’

  ‘We can’t dismiss the possibility, though,’ says Sam. ‘Can you remember the name of the man who died?’

  Richard snorts, not looking up from Katie’s shoulder. ‘You think I’ll ever forget? His name was Thomas Shaw. He has a family, too, a son who must be twenty-five years old by now. I used to look him up sometimes – he’d often post about how hard life was without a dad, and after a while it became too much to take. That’s when I got rid of all my devices and moved back to Wales.’

  ‘We’ll investigate it,’ says Katie. ‘But I think Nathan’s right, this is unlikely to be connected. And I think you should focus on all those people you helped to save, rather than the ones that slipped away.’ As she says this, Katie places a hand on her stomach and thin
ks of the efforts the doctors must have made with her. Were they giving their all? Could they have done more, acted faster, and saved not only her life but the chance of giving life to another?

  ‘I’m going back to the police station to see what I can find,’ says Sam.

  ‘You can drop us off at the hotel, then,’ says Katie. ‘Nathan and Richard both need a rest.’ Katie pulls out the mobile that Sam had given her earlier, waving it towards her. ‘You know where we are if you need us.’

  Sixteen

  Nathan is back in the run-down hotel room, staring out of the window at the downpour that’s started. He finds it hard to believe that less than two days earlier he was sitting in their picturesque cottage with a glass of wine in his hand, staring out across the Pembrokeshire hills, shielding his eyes from the sun. That seems a world away now. That seems like a different life.

  Katie is sitting on the edge of the bed with the doctor, who seems to have aged another ten years since the discovery of his friend’s body. She is talking to him in a hushed voice, consoling him and, Nathan suspects, gently pressing for any extra tiny detail that might help them with the case. Nathan feels so useless now, suddenly longing for the return of the gift that he had for so long considered a curse.

  ‘You should be resting,’ Katie calls across to him.

  He smiles back, touched and in some ways relieved by her concern. He needs to find a way to prove to her that he can still be helpful to the investigation, so he nods and returns his attention to the world outside, a world in which a serial killer is preparing for their next move.

  He yawns, and lets his thoughts start to drift back more than twenty years, to when he was teenager writing his journal. Those had been difficult times, struggling to cope with changes in both his body and his mind. The journal had been a form of release, a way of making his terrible dreams – which came both day and night – seem less real. He can picture himself as a skinny younger man scratching his tiny handwriting onto the page, sometimes, as he’d recently revealed for the first time, in a kind of trance, purging himself of awful thoughts. There had been hundreds of pages, maybe thousands of crimes. When he’d been asked at the inquest about the missing pages, he’d been unable to say why they might have been removed, because he had no way of knowing what was on them. But now he has two of those pages. If he looks at them, if he reads them carefully, might he spot the connection?

  ‘Can I borrow your phone?’ he asks Katie.

  She hands it to him without asking why, but he can tell she wants to know. He has nobody to call, no friends in the world other than her, and now even their relationship is being tested.

  The extract is all over the news and the various social media platforms he checks: jokes, comments, articles, comparisons. It’s clear that everyone has an opinion on what’s happened before, and what might happen next. He quickly finds the website of the blogger who’s been receiving the pages first-hand and, moving to a chair in a corner of the room, he starts to read his own words again.

  Something’s not right, he can feel it, but it takes him a while to pinpoint exactly what – and then he remembers: he and his twin had once agreed on a shared handwriting style, to infuriate their mother, seamlessly do each other’s homework and generally cause mayhem as the identical little rascals they were. It had taken weeks of practice, but eventually they had it down to an art form. Only the brothers could identify the minute details that differentiated their handwriting.

  Nathan stares at the text at the bottom of the first extract, the page which had described the murders of Steven Fish and Mike Peters. Then he checks the second page, that predicted the way Dr Nigel Hartham would meet his end. He waits until he’s absolutely certain before sharing his discovery with the room.

  ‘I didn’t write all this,’ he says, passing the phone back to Katie with a shaking hand. ‘Christian has changed some of my words. Look here…’ He points at the screen, but the writing is tiny and he takes the phone back to enlarge the text. With his broken fingers it isn’t easy, but eventually she can see where he means.

  ‘The tail of that “s” and the curl on that “e”, that’s definitely Christian’s handwriting. And if you look really closely, you can see there’s one more line that’s just a little more squeezed in than the others.’

  ‘I’ve walked down here before…’ Katie starts to read, ‘but back then I never imagined this might be a place where I would kill. It had always been Mother’s dream, a place of tranquillity, and I know it will be the same for me once my own dream has become a reality.’

  ‘And on the next page,’ says Nathan, impatiently waiting for Katie to scroll down to it. ‘Towards the top there’s something about a twisted oak that’s grown around a barbed wire fence, with a single letter carved above it in the bark.’

  ‘Do you remember that place?’ asks Katie, excited now.

  Nathan shakes his head, searching his mind again and finding the same answer. ‘I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen that tree, but if the first bit is about my mother, mine and Christian’s mother, then perhaps…’

  Katie jumps to her feet, before turning back towards Richard. ‘You should stay here.’

  ‘You’re forgetting who has the car,’ he says, holding out a hand for her to pull him up.

  ‘We should tell Sam,’ says Nathan.

  ‘Not yet,’ says Katie, deftly flicking off the back of the mobile and unhousing the battery, before slipping all the parts into her pocket. ‘We’ll give her a call if we find anything important.’

  Seventeen

  Despite all that’s happened, Katie is struggling to keep a smile from her face when she looks over at Nathan from her place in the speeding car. She’s remembering what it was that she loved so much about him: he was troubled but brilliant; dark, but capable of bringing so much light. She remembers the early days, before Nathan had arrived on her team, and how she would carefully study old cases and read book after book on the workings of a killer’s mind. It was her fascination. It was her obsession. With Nathan, it was like having a killer as a partner. He could tell her things no book or crime scene ever could. And for a long time she believed he could be trusted, so much so that she had grown closer to him than to any other person she had ever known. Things are different now: complicated, damaged, and yet still there’s nobody else she would rather have alongside her.

  ‘Any idea what we’re going to find?’ she asks, as Richard drives them over Kingston Bridge.

  ‘I can think of some things,’ says Nathan. ‘I’m just hoping I’m wrong.’

  ‘But your brother must have been expecting you, and only you could recognise the things he added to the journal.’

  ‘Unless he was the one that tore the pages out. We’ve never found out where he was living. Maybe we were never supposed to find his additions. Maybe they’re nothing more than evidence of Christian trying to be like me, reading through my journal and adding a few of his own dark thoughts, reconnecting with our childhood. And of course, the killer might not know what they found in these pages. They might simply have seen them as a source of inspiration, or instructions Christian had left behind. Work to be done, perhaps.’

  Katie nods as she checks the side mirror for the hundredth time, reassuring herself that they’re not being followed. She might have taken the battery out of the phone Sam gave her, but Katie doesn’t doubt the woman could find another way to track their movements. Her instincts have told her not to trust the new-found freedom Sam was allowing them. Was this as a result of Nathan’s attack? Had that been proof enough of their innocence? It’s a nice thought, but she’s far from convinced.

  Nathan directs Richard to a road that runs alongside the river in Isleworth, and Katie recognises it as being just two streets away from where Nathan had lived when they were working together. She’d visited there plenty of times, but only gone in on a couple of occasions, mostly arriving very early or very late to pick him up and follow a lead. On the opposite side of the river Katie can see a
group of young mothers keeping a close eye on their children as they play. She tries to ignore the lurch in her stomach and looks away.

  ‘Follow me,’ says Nathan, climbing slowly out of the car once they’ve parked up. Katie can see that some blood has soaked through the bandage and through his shirt. Even with the baseball cap and sunglasses that they’ve purchased, this would be enough to draw attention. She’s pulled her long hair forward to part-cover the scars on her face as they head back along a riverside path towards Richmond, passing under the Teddington Bridge and then the railway bridge. Immediately on the other side of the bridge, Nathan turns and points towards a huge white three-storey Victorian property set well back from the river.

  ‘That’s what he was talking about,’ he says. ‘That’s where my mum was born and raised. Whenever she walked us along here she would tell us it was her dream to return one day.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ says Richard. ‘That’s why I went back to Wales, to the place of my birth. You can never really go back, though,’ says the old man, sadly. ‘What’s done is done. What’s seen cannot be unseen.’

  ‘That’s probably why my mum never tried to buy the place,’ says Nathan, still staring up at the house. ‘Even after she’d made her millions writing novels. It had to remain a dream, nothing more. And then, well, we all know what happened next…’

  ‘Well, let’s go and see who does own the place,’ says Katie, striding down a bank of grass, over a fence and onto a long gravel drive.

  It doesn’t take her long to realise that it’s a care home, as she approaches the back of the building and sees a line of elderly folk seated around the edge of a large room with a television on in the corner.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, as they approach. ‘I don’t think this is going to be much help.’

  ‘Damn it,’ says Nathan. ‘I was probably wrong about what my brother was referring to.’ He squeezes his eyes shut and looks up to the sky. ‘Perhaps Christian knew our mum better than I did.’